The Mystery of Charles Dickens

by A. N. Wilson

  Amateur novelists, those who believe that everyone somehow has ‘a novel in them’, tend, when they write their one or two novels, to put down their own experiences, or what they artlessly believe to have been their experiences, and simply change the names of characters, making the figure who represents themselves rather more clever, attractive or adventurous than was the case in real life; or, for ironists, more accident-prone, more foolish and so on. Habitual novelists, however – especially those who take the novel to the height of an art-form – are in a very different situation. They might very often ‘use’ real life. Tolstoy’s Bald Hills is indistinguishable from the house where he grew up, and all the characters in the opening chapters of War and Peace were drawn directly from life, though as the novel progresses, this was less and less the case and they developed that mysterious ‘life of their own’ which seems to be the alchemical effect of all great imagination.

  Tolstoy, however, came to hate the art of fiction, perhaps for the very simple reason that he could observe the process at work which we observe in, for example, Dickens. The habit of mind that allows a great imagination to transform experience into a novel, the mimetic arts that it exercises, the processes of make-believe that it requires, are often stronger than the parts of the writer’s personality that are exercised in their everyday lives, their relationships with their families, and so forth. One of the most conspicuously hilarious examples of this was given in Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, in which the novelist, for the time being, driven insane by a mistaken admixture of a sleeping draught and copious quantities of alcohol, is imprisoned in his own creative self. He is a caricature. His face has become an irremovable carapace.

  Dickens, as an actor and as a novelist, and as a man, was a man of masks, who probably never revealed himself to anyone; quite conceivably, he did not reveal himself to himself. As time went by, and in particular as he became caught up not merely in writing, but in performing his novels in public readings, he was, in effect, as much a fictional character as Bill Sikes or Mrs Gamp.

  ‘From these garish lights, I now vanish for evermore,’21 Dickens had said at what was to be his last public reading from his novels. In the nineteenth-century theatre the footlights were garish indeed, a row of smoking oil – later gas – lamps, melting the greasepaint of the players on the one side, half blinding those in the front rows of the audience on the other.

  Dickens wanted to live on both sides of this garish, overheated row. He had grown up stage-struck. When he was seven, his mother and father took him up to London to see the Christmas pantomime, and he had been entranced by the make-up of the clowns, their thick white face-paint, and their appetite for sausages. Harlequin and Pantaloon held him in raptures, and he ‘thought that to marry a Columbine would be to attain the highest pitch of all human felicity!’22 A little later, a troupe of them had visited Chatham, where his improvident father was working as a naval clerk, and the child had stared with wonder at the little boys ‘with frills as white as they could be washed’,23 smelling of sawdust and orange peel, and accompanied by ‘a crafty magician holding a young lady in bondage’.24 Even after he had begun to enjoy great success as a writer, after the publication of Pickwick, and in the middle of writing Oliver Twist, Dickens, at a publisher’s request, took on the task of revising a clumsily written biography of the great clown Grimaldi,25 whom he had seen perform at the Theatre Royal, Chatham. Dickens, very appropriately, dictated his revisions to his father, out of charity – for John Dickens was everlastingly on the point of tumbling into debt. Dickens wrote to his friend John Forster, ‘Seventeen hundred Grimaldis have already been sold, and the demand increases daily!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’26

  In addition to pantomime and burlesque, Dickens had also seen mainstream, serious theatre as a child, and was among those lucky enough to have witnessed Edmund Kean and Charles Mathews’s interpretations of the great Shakespearean roles. As a schoolboy in London, and as an aspirant journalist, he devoted every available evening to attending the theatre. In those days only theatres with a licence could produce spoken drama, but there were many who added songs to the performance, and cobbled together ‘burlettas’. He also haunted ‘private theatres’ where amateurs performed. Mr Wopsle’s Hamlet was no fantasy. In Sketches by Boz, Dickens tells how ‘dirty boys, low copying-clerks, in attorney’s offices’ and ‘capacious-headed youths from city-counting-houses’ trod the boards under stage names – ‘Belville, Melville, Treville, Berkeley, Randolph, Byron, St Clair’. [SB 13, ‘Private Theatres’]

  The fascination of being somebody else: that was what the theatre offered, whether you were a ‘low clerk’ pretending to be Macbeth or a professional actor such as Mr Vincent Crummles, or whether you were sitting in the audience night after night. It was only by the time of his marriage, when he needed the regular income which writing had begun to provide, that Dickens appears finally to have given up the hope of an actual career on the stage. And the desire to write, and perform in, plays never left him. In the year he was writing Pickwick, he was offered £30 for a farce in two acts called The Strange Gentleman, which was a stage adaptation of one of the Sketches by Boz called ‘The Great Winglebury Duel’. It was produced at St James’s Theatre. A year or so later he wrote The Lamplighter, which he hoped would be acted by William Macready, though nothing came of this. As soon as he found himself with surplus cash, having moved into 48 Doughty Street – just north of Gray’s Inn – with his wife and burgeoning family, Dickens had begun to donate to theatrical charities – the Theatrical Fund, the Artists’ Benevolent Fund and the Drury Lane Theatre Fund27 – and, of course, as well as writing for the theatre, attending the theatre and supporting the impoverished members of the acting profession, he was himself an enthusiastic actor.

  However busy he was meeting deadlines as a novelist or a journalist, Dickens nearly always had some theatrical project on the go. In 1845, for example, he hired a private theatre in Dean Street, Soho, where Frances Kelly, a retired actress, ran a theatre school. Here he, his future biographer John Forster, Mark Lemon, the editor of Punch, and other friends enacted Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour. Dickens commissioned the scene painting and oversaw the making of the costumes, which were based on seventeenth-century pictures. ‘I am half dead with managerial work – and with actual work in shirt sleeves; with a dirty face, a hammer and a bag of nails.’28 They assembled an impressive audience – Tennyson, the Duke of Devonshire, Count d’Orsay, Macready. Not everyone was impressed – Carlyle wrote of ‘poor little Dickens, all painted in black and red, and affecting the voice of a man of six feet’.29 But others were less scornful. One guest remembered, ‘He literally floated in braggadocio. His air of supreme conceit and frothy pomp in the earlier scenes came out with prodigious force in contrast with the subsequent humiliation.’30 (Dickens was playing Bobadil.)

  Another production at Miss Kelly’s theatre was The Merry Wives of Windsor with George Lewes, Augustus Egg and George Cruikshank in the cast. (Carlyle was more impressed by this performance – ‘Plaudite, Plaudite!’) Queen Victoria and Prince Albert themselves saw Dickens’s benefit repeat performance of Every Man in His Humour. They also attended a performance of his own comedy Not So Bad as We Seem, some three weeks before the opening of the Great Exhibition in 1851.

  By 1857, when the Dickens family were enduring a painfully long visit from Hans Christian Andersen, Dickens put on the play on which he had collaborated with Wilkie Collins, The Frozen Deep. When it was staged in London, it drew perhaps the most star-studded of all Dickens’s audiences, with the Duke of Somerset supplying hothouse flowers. The Queen not only enjoyed the melodrama, but also stayed behind to see the farce that was enacted after the interval, and sent to Dickens that she wanted to meet him. He declined, saying that he could not be presented to his sovereign in the costume of a farceur. She replied saying that the costume could not be ‘as ridiculous as that’, but he still declined.31

  Such was the success of The Frozen Deep b
efore privately invited audiences in London that it was decided to take it to a commercial theatre in the provinces. They took the Free Trade Hall in Manchester towards the end of August 1857, and had audiences of more than 3,000. Speaking of Dickens’s performance in Manchester, Wilkie Collins recorded, ‘The trite phrase is the true phrase to describe that magnificent piece of acting. He literally electrified the audience.’32 Dickens himself spoke of ‘rending the very heart out of my body’ as he enacted the main role.33

  The move from an amateur to a professional stage had required an adjustment to the cast. His daughters Mamie and Katey, and the other female members of the cast, had to be replaced with professional actresses. Thus it came about that the Ternans entered Dickens’s life.

  It is impossible to say on which side of the garish lights the thunderclap took place, but this production of The Frozen Deep was to change Charles Dickens’s life. The melodrama of existence was to soar into a new act. ‘If you make believe very much, it’s quite nice,’ the Marchioness said to Dick Swiveller, telling him that if he put pieces of orange peel into cold water he could make-believe it was wine. [OCS 64] Make-believe becomes its own redemptive Marriage Feast at Cana.

  Dickens had been, up to this point in his life, an artist without parallel in the history of literature, a modernistic novelist who took the novel into the direction of burlesque and pantomime. Like Ben Jonson (as formative a role model, really, for Dickens, as Shakespeare), his technique was to crowd his stage with ‘characters’. His own life-story had been plundered freely – more, perhaps, than we shall ever know, because (as in the case of Ruth Richardson recently discovering that the infant Dickens grew up almost next door to the Cleveland Street Workhouse) new biographical research is always uncovering the ways in which ‘real life’ fed into the fiction, the ways in which he hopped to and fro from either side of the footlights. But these wonderful Sketches and Episodes, sewn together haphazardly as serial novels, had lacked an underlying unity. Then in 1849, when he was thirty-seven, had come David Copperfield, a sort of spoof autobiography, which had knit together experience. There had followed three novels of overpowering greatness, Bleak House, Hard Times and Little Dorrit. As we have suggested, in Little Dorrit Dickens had revisited painful areas of his childhood experience, and his consciousness of family-membership. Micawber cannot be crushed. He bobs up like a cork whenever the waves engulf him, and in the end he is transported – one might almost say translated – to Australia where, against all probability, he becomes a successful colonial administrator. After the experience of watching his father die in the ‘slaughterhouse’ of Keppel Street, Dickens could not project his experiences in anything like so sunny a way. Dorrit is a much crueller portrait of his father than Micawber. Dorrit is selfish, manipulative, pretentious and, much of the time, odious. But unlike the uncrushable Micawber, he is defeated. Even if eventually, in obedience to the requirements of the creaking plot, he is found not to be a debtor after all, and is released in style from the Marshalsea, Mr Dorrit is a broken man. Dickens saw the debtor as Pushkin saw the little man crushed by the Bronze Horseman, the vast statue of Peter the Great against whom the ‘little man’ does not stand a chance: a figure who could never be strong enough against the system.

  Dickens himself was the passionate champion of the small person against the system, both in his fiction and in his various charitable endeavours. He had ceased to be a small person. He was a man of consequence. The man who was now laid out, gasping, on the carpet of the dining room at Gad’s Hill was one of the great men of the age, his company sought out by the Queen herself, his name familiar in everyone’s mouth as a Household Word indeed.

  That was not how it felt inside. His childhood self was his secret sharer, his hidden stowaway, his constant companion throughout the triumphs of his adult existence.

  Mr Dorrit, when he became confused at the public dinner in Italy, began to blurt out his unmentionable past, and to speak as if he were still in the Marshalsea Prison. This is one of the most excruciating scenes in literature, and the creation of a man who, figuratively, was in constant danger of exposing his weaknesses. Hence the need, in the truly great artist, to guard his divided self, or selves. The healthy soul is integrated, at one. He has no need for subterfuge or pretence. He is Joe Gargery, able, with such devastating truthfulness, to explain to Pip why they will no longer be suitable companions in the future: ‘“Pip”, said Joe, appearing a little hurried and troubled, “there has been larks. And, dear sir, what have been betwixt us – have been.’” [GE 57]

  Dickens was many personae, wore many masks and was a divided, sick soul, as far from Joe Gargery as it was possible to be. Those who lead the divided life find comfort in formalizing these divisions. Hence the relationship with Nelly. She left no record of it, or of how it felt to be his secret, though she did murmur in later life that she had ‘often’ been to Gad’s Hill, and it may be that they were together much more than has sometimes been supposed.

  There is a danger, among those who interest themselves in Dickens’s ‘secret’ or ‘private’ life, that one is doing no more than engaging in tittle-tattle. That a Victorian man in his forties took a mistress, and kept her existence a secret from the world, is surely neither here nor there.

  But Dickens was more than just a Victorian man. He was one of the greatest artists who ever chose to write in the English language. And central to that art, pivotal, is the division of self. It was a divided self who created the alternative comic universe that is ‘The Dickens World’. Only a sick soul, or a divided self – however one describes it – could have created these books. Dickens the human being, like many in an unhappy relationship, looked for another person to provide him with love. Dickens the artist, a magpie beadily seizing on a trinket that caught the sunlight, needed something in his life that would formalize the division of his imaginative existence. His daughter Katey – as we shall see – looked back, horrified at the behaviour of herself and her siblings in allowing Dickens to smash up the family and send his wife into exile. He ‘didn’t give a damn about any of us’.34 This is true, but his was more than the simple, selfish old story of someone committing adultery, and more than the cliché of the bored man having a middle-aged crisis and taking up with a much younger woman, though it is obviously both those things. It is also the story of an artist whose art depended on having a divided self, depended on having a double life.

  Acting, the theatre, burlesque, pantomime, they were all of vital importance to Dickens’s art, but his art was not here. It was in the novel that he soared to his great heights, in the novel that he touched millions of human hearts. In the alternative-universe autobiography David Copperfield, he offered readers what was clearly meant as a piece of his own, real autobiography, and was also in the nature of a novelist’s manifesto. The context is this. David has lost his mother’s love to her new husband, Mr Murdstone, who is cruel and unfeeling. As he felt ‘more and more shut out and alienated from my mother’ [DC 4], he retreated into reading fiction and then – hence the novel we find in our hands as we read about it – into the writing of it.

  When he came to write novels, there is one aspect of Dickens’s genius that must trouble even his most ardent admirers: namely, his depiction of women, and his imaginative need to desex them, to eviscerate them sexually, emotionally, imaginatively.

  The supposed reason for British Victorian novels being sex-free zones is that middle-class fathers and mothers liked to read them aloud in the bosom of their family, and it was clearly undesirable for graphic depictions of sexual love, such as you might find in Balzac, to corrupt the innocent young hearers. This might or might not have been the case, but it does not really address what for some readers is the problem of Dickens and the women. His great contemporary, Thackeray, for example, wrote his masterpiece Vanity Fair with a woman, Becky Sharp, as the most lively and beguilingly wicked central intelligence. Dickens, it could be answered, narrated half of one of his masterpieces, Bleak House, in the voice
of Esther Summerson, but this only highlights what for some readers is the problem. Esther is only a half-presence on the page. Her virtues of submissiveness and forbearance are frankly tedious, and very often her ‘voice’, which is a simpering one, is mercifully replaced by Dickens’s own, when he forgets to ‘be’ Esther. As for Victorian novels not dealing with real-life women, or with sexual matters, this is simply not true. Consider the novels of George Eliot, where, for example, the disastrous marriage of Dorothea Brooke to Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch, while not being physically graphic in the manner of, say, D. H. Lawrence, is realistically analysed, as are the marriages of the other pairs in the book. Anthony Trollope, in every way a lesser novelist than George Eliot or Dickens or Thackeray, nevertheless has women who are recognizably people with sexual feelings and independence of mind.

  Dickens’s novels pulsate with sexual feeling – we shall be discussing this later – but it is the feelings of the author, rather than the feelings of, say, Kate Nickleby, Dora Copperfield, Agnes Wickfield, Esther Summerson and the gallery of submissive, sexless-seeming wifelets and nymphs and half-child-brides, who tiptoe through his pages.

  The generalization needs to checked. It is only in a respectable middle-class setting that the women are so wet. We do find women with profound sexual feelings in Dickens’s pages: Nancy, the prostitute in Oliver Twist; Miss Wade, the overpowering lesbian in Little Dorrit, who elopes with ‘Tattycoram’; Bella Wilfer, in Our Mutual Friend. For the most part, however, when we are aware of women as sexual beings, it is in their sense of emotional frustration – Edith Dombey, or Mrs Joe Gargery, who, one assumes, is both frustrated in her relationship with the child-like blacksmith and is undergoing the menopause. I write ‘one assumes’, but what one is less sure of – and this is the problem of Dickens, for some readers – is that we cannot be sure that Dickens himself understands these things, or, if he understood them, whether he found them even remotely sympathetic. Whereas Joe grows in the course of the book and becomes a character we truly admire, Mrs Joe remains a joke harridan, a furious pantomime dame wielding the cane with which she intends to berate her younger brother.